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Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.
by 1over137 9mo ago
Commercial OSes (both Windows and macOS) are also both American, and lots of people are trying to de-Americanize.
- cyberpunk 9mo agoYep, I'm in this boat. After years of macs my next will be a FreeBSD Desktop. edit: Although phone is much harder. I guess I'll just turn all the 'stuff' like icloud off, use only signal and my banking/etc apps, and get a separate camera.. Anyone found a less painful way to live without an iPhone/Android?
- Forgeties79 9mo agoAs someone who had been in the Apple ecosystem since Windows XP, it was difficult to lose that constant seamless interplay between my phone and computer. But honestly? The trade-off was worth it in the end. I’m 8mo into Linux-only desktop and man…it’s great.
- 20after4 9mo agoLook into KDE Connect¹ - it provides some of that seamless experience. It even has some basic support for syncing between iOS and Gnome, but it's originally designed for seamless integration between Android and KDE's plasma desktop. 1. https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
- Forgeties79 9mo agoI use it some but it’s just not the same. Very useful and well built don’t get me wrong.
- heavyset_go 9mo agoWorks on macOS and Windows, too.
- barnabee 9mo agoGrapheneOS is not quite "without" Android but it's without what makes it bad (Google) and works fine for me. I hear LineageOS is ok too.
- palata 9mo agoI love GrapheneOS, but note that it only runs on Google Pixels. But that's what I chose for the smartphone. Hopefully GrapheneOS will soon be supported by a non-US phone...
- immibis 9mo agoNote that Google Pixel hardware is just fine and not evil, and they're looking at a different vendor for the next version anyway, because Google is making it so the Pixel will only run approved OSes.
- ranger_danger 9mo agoYou mean the Pixel hardware that employs a proprietary black-box security chip that they pinky-promised to open source but never did?
- immibis 9mo agoOh no! A TPM without a driver! How can I trust any device that has a TPM I don't have a driver for?
- ranger_danger 9mo agoThe Titan chip does a lot more than sign and store keys. It also has storage (could contain malicious payloads) as well as an RNG and AES/SHA accelerators (which could be weakened/compromised), among other things.
- touwer 9mo agoFairphone with Graphene
- hans_castorp 9mo agoGraphene only runs on Pixel phones
- wojciii 9mo agoI really like my Fairphone. I would but their next model if it grapheneos was available.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoBSD is great on desktop now! I'm on it too.
- pjmlp 9mo agoHowever if we don't get something like SuSE desktops and laptops at Media Markt and friends, most people won't care. In fact I know of library that rolled back to Windows kiosk mode, from a previous SuSE deployment, because it wasn't what library users were expecting.
- shevy-java 9mo agoYeah. The TechBros changed things globally. I can not support their Evilness, so I also need to get people to commit to having viable alternatives, e. g. improving LibreOffice to the point where the proprietary office suites from US corporations are no longer needed.
- palata 9mo agoI don't think that the proprietary office suites are needed. The alternatives are good enough for what people do, aren't they? The problem is that people don't want to change, because it takes some effort. Why would people use WhatsApp instead of Signal otherwise?
- iAMkenough 9mo agoFor the context of this thread, WhatsApp and Signal are both American. Just look to the federal United States government using it for communicating military strikes, and including journalists.
- dmantis 9mo agoBut it doesn't make Signal bad. If Americans blindly process our messages without knowing what's inside, it's worse than not depending on them, but better than showing your private correspondence to somebody. At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time. Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw. Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).
- immibis 9mo agoSimplex is a project by a fervent COVID conspiracy theorist FYI. (Evidence: his Twitter page)
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- anon291 9mo agoLinux is also realistically American since the largest contributors are American corporations and the dictator for life lives on Portland oregon. America has a monopoly on software essentially.
- cultofmetatron 9mo agoassumign this is arguing in good faith.. the issue is not about it being american as it is america being in control of it. you don't get access to windows or mac os source code. You can however take the linux source code, fork it and make it yours. that "dictator for life" in portland can't stop you. nor can anyone else in the us government for that matter.
- 20after4 9mo agoNot to mention that many of the most important open source events and organizations are based in Europe.
- luckylion 9mo agoBut technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes. So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.
- cultofmetatron 9mo ago> but it's a lot of work, so very few do. sure but a nation state that takes digital sovereignty seriously could easily devote some resources towards maintaining their own fork. Thats the point. Hell, north korea has their own special linux distro
- 1over137 9mo agoIt doesn't much matter that Americans are the largest contributors, because you can still take it and change it however you want.